Every reception is influenced by the receptions that have come before it.

Liz Gloyn writes elsewhere in Strange Horizons about the current state of play in terms of scholarship; here I review what is the third conference in four years to address the area.

Underneath my skin, I come and go.

Writing always feels like a balancing act, negotiated between the assumed center — whose voices and privileges and needs have been so drummed into me that they operate almost at an unconscious level — and the margins, the silent majority whose stories are deemed not to matter. 

"I was equally beguiled by the fact that the novel is structured like a life is structured as opposed to a novel: around the seasonal shifts of the year, the rituals of daily experience, the cultural and personal rites of passage from childhood to adulthood."

"The characteristics of epic fantasy—the orcs and dwarves, the axes and magic, but also the narrative structures and reading protocols its dominance of commercial fantasy fiction have encouraged—have permeated our culture so thoroughly that it is hard to see the word "ogre", read about a swordfight, or follow a questing band of medieval-ish protagonists without certain assumptions being cued for us."

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the issues.